Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:00:00] S0: I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce. Surprisingly, designers are just the most unhappy on every dimension. [00:00:08] S1: We're unclear right now what is expected of a designer. Someone who might be classically trained in a certain way of working now feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to really change everything. [00:00:17] S0: You believe this is the best time in history to be a designer. [00:00:20] S1: We're all extremely early in this process. There's just a huge opportunity for designers. Nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. There's just so much opportunity to change the way we work, to make great things. [00:00:36] S0: If you look at engineering, it's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design. [00:00:43] S1: Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100 excerpt productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. Sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. [00:00:56] S0: We had a podcast with native design Claude Code, Jenny Wen. She talked about there's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, test, use research, iterate, and now there's just no time for that.
00:00:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:00:56] S0: We had a podcast with native design Claude Code, Jenny Wen. She talked about there's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, test, use research, iterate, and now there's just no time for that. [00:01:05] S1: There's certain features for ChatGPT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a hundred things and we throw out 99 and we finally ship one. And other things we really embrace building in public. We take big swings and then we learn quickly. [00:01:19] S0: Do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? [00:01:22] S1: I think it already is an incredible product designer. [00:01:26] S0: Today, my guest is Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI. Ian's been in this role for three years now, which is a lifetime in AI time. Prior to OpenAI, he was at Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram that I absolutely loved. Before that, he spent eight years at Instagram. The role of design is in such an interesting place right now, and Ian has such a unique and insightful and fascinating take on the future of product design and what the AI tools that we use every day will look like in the future. [00:02:20] S1: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:02:20 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:20] S1: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. [00:02:22] S0: I'm even more excited. Something that I'm very excited to get your take on. I don't know if you've watched me doing this, but I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce over the past couple of years. I think it's the biggest survey of its kind. We basically survey people in tech about how they're feeling about their careers, their work, their roles, especially with the rise of AI this last year. And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the least optimistic, the most worried, the most tired, also the least likely to recommend their role to people entering the workforce. I'm curious if you are seeing this yourself in the design community. And if you are, what do you think is going on?
00:03:18 · Ian Silber
[00:03:18] S1: First of all, it's an incredible survey and it's such great, I think, information to have as an industry. And I think it's something we need to unpack. And I see a mix for sure. I think I can speak most to design. And I mean, I talk to a lot of designers that are very optimistic and very excited. And so in my world, luckily, I see a lot of that, but I can totally understand why people might be feeling very uncertain. Because there's so much discussion about, well, is the role changing? Should my expectations be different? And well, do I need to do X, Y, and Z? Do I need to be shipping code every day? And someone who might be sort of classically trained in a certain way of working now feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I need to really change everything." And I think to me right now, it feels like the uncertainty of that, I can totally understand. Because as an engineer, I think people, they've already sort of gone through that shift. We see that engineers are working totally different. One thing I do hear, and this came up a lot in my own team when we do similar surveys internally. One of the big things that came up was we see that engineers have 10 or sometimes 100X their productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still, sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out versus maybe working with a coding agent, you ask it to do something that's pretty binary. Now at this point, it usually sort of gets it pretty well. But the design process is really still very messy and fluid and you think you have a great idea and you try it and it sucks. And then you try it again and it sucks and you give it to users or you get internal feedback and it's wrong. And you still have to go through that arduous and kind of messy but really fun process. And that hasn't really... It's compressed in that you can get much more ideas out fast, but you still need that whole sort of feedback loop. There's the alignment of getting many people, especially in a bigger company, that still has a lot of overhead. So the point is that I think that we're unclear right now what is expected of a designer and that lack of clarity I can see totally lead to some fears or some unease, I guess. But on the other hand, I've seen that, I mean our designers, what's great I think at OpenAI is we're such an experimental company.
00:06:47 · Ian Silber
We are driven by research and we treat our company as a research lab and we totally embrace that. And that's a new thing that I really learned and have really come to love about OpenAI is that started as a research lab, that DNA is deeply embedded in everything we do. And as designers, I think that you come here, we look for people that don't have a background in AI, but are really curious about the tools and how it can work. And we found that just by supporting that excitement to explore, that people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work, but it's more about encouraging exploration. And when we've done that, when I go and talk to both very senior designers and early career designers at our company, they're so excited because they... I literally was just asking some people before this because I wanted to get some different takes. And I think the feeling is that they have so much more ability to be creative, to express themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. They can just really move through lots of different ideas and it becomes this incredible way to create. And the things that I'm seeing from my team, the bar is raising. I think the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using these tools. So I think for the people that are starting to embrace this, they're starting to feel really excited and realizing that they have just so much agency as designers and so much more ability to have really high impact as a designer. What I see in the folks that I think are really embracing this, they are using it every step of the process to help them. And I think it helps. We have a community, of course, of designers that are all trying this together. So if there's any way to find that, and that's something that we should think about more as a broader community, how we help each other. But I think that learning different ways of working. And so it might be, "Okay, I have this idea. Let me just actually start by trying, what if I just threw this right into Codex or Claude?" or whatever tool you use. Throw it into an agent to help you think about it, to help you prototype it. Just try a different way of working. It doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be the exact right way, but I don't know. I think we've found that just people that are embracing this that are adaptable.
00:10:14 · Ian Silber
I think adaptability is another term that I think we all hear a lot now, but it's so true. It's knowing that this stuff changes very quickly. What didn't work yesterday might work today. I mean, literally within six months, this entire industry has shifted. I remember I was actually out on paternity leave towards the end of last year, and I was working on some side projects. I was trying some coding agents and it worked, but it just kept running into these hiccups. And then a month later, Codex drops and I try it again and it's like, oh my gosh, it just works. And that I think changes a lot of the design process because now all of a sudden, if you do have an idea, you can plop it in there and just try it. And so anyways, I think it's just really about not being scared. I think another thing to think about is that we're so early. We're so in early innings of this entire evolution. It feels like things have changed a lot, and it feels like maybe we're pretty far into this shift. But the good news for anybody who is trying to design or get into design, whether, again, if you're early career or late career, or you've never even actually designed anything, but you've been thinking about it, is we're all figuring this out as we go. Nobody has some perfect answer about how the design process should work. And whatever you think is working today will probably change again. And so I think what's encouraging about this is that nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. And just really thinking about how you can just make great stuff. And there's just so much opportunity to change the way you work or just to make great things. And what we think is really cutting edge today will look so archaic in a year, let alone a month. And that's something I've learned. I've been at OpenAI for three years, and I think about the stuff that we were working on when I first joined. I mean, I remember getting a demo of our early voice mode that we hadn't shipped or computer use that barely worked. And now it literally has become part of the process of how we design. We use both of those tools to build software. And so anyways, the point is it's changing very quickly. We're all extremely early in this process and nobody really has it figured out.